Did you invent radar jamming in your head?
OP:
EA-18G Growler be like: The enemy cant see me if their retinas are evaporated!
Radar works like this; imagine you’re playing hide and seek in the woods after dark. You have a flashlight and you think it’s a good idea to shine it around looking for your buddies, and if you see them with the flashlight that’s the radar dot. Making the dot big is like having all your buddies who are supposed to be hiding also having REALLY BIG flashlights, so bright that you can’t see what you’re looking at very well.
In warfare the hide and seek game also includes a gun, and even a really bright light still more or less tells you exactly where it’s coming from allowing you to shoot at the light until it goes out. Not great for the survivability of the hiders!
The smart hider might set up their jamming light somewhere else so the seeker shoots at nothing, however the lights are still very expensive and they make cheap rockets designed to home in directly on radar and blow it up. The least expensive way overall for the hider to avoid the seeker is for the hider to wear all black clothing and be small.
hider to wear all black clothing and be small.
Now I’m imagining a chibi style anthropomorphic plane wearing all black clothes trying to be sneaky.
You did this to me.
The shy goth plane is making me feel things
I think your browsing habits are what did it to you, Mr. O’Brien. We did not install Warp 10+ fiber connections so you could browse anthropomorphic porn!
Hey now, I just said anthro planes, YOU brought porn into it.
Has there ever been a chibi plane you didn’t want to put oil in, Mr. O’Brien? Answer truthfully now.
Planes? Course not.
Maybe Julian, he’s always dragging me to the holodeck for some world War 1 and 2 dogfights over Europe.
Don’t look at my starship homework folder…
If anyone suddenly found themselves wondering if it’s home in or hone in, from the grammerist.com
“Home in and hone in are different since home in is to direct attention, while hone in is to perfect a skill. The two phrases seem the same because of how they are used in sentences.”
It also says hone in is used informally for home in and generally accepted even though it’s not really correct usage. “Home in” exists because of the homing pigeons.
however the lights are still very expensive and they make cheap rockets designed to home in directly on radar and blow it up
why do you hate momma MIC and daddy pentagon and our economy and good paying working class jobs
EA-18G: rolls up with a 10M candlepower spotlight and a pocket full of Class 4 lasers
So like maybe I’m dumb, but instead of like electronic warfare, couldn’t you disperse maybe some really probably toxic, radar reflecting material or vapor on a radar site?
Like radar sweeps aren’t exactly undetectable and they also give their location don’t they?
We do that, it’s called bombs. We bomb the radar when we can, which makes it not work. If you can get close enough to disperse something, you’re close enough to drop a bomb which has the advantage of preventing the radar from working again later.
Radar sweeps do give away their location, and radiation seeking missiles exist whose only job is to lock on to where radar is coming from and make it blow up even if the radar tries to turn off.
As someone else mentioned chaff can also be effective but it’s mostly used against missiles with little radars in the nose, to confuse that little radar and make the missile miss.
What IS sometimes done is an electronic warfare plane will fly off to where the strike team isn’t and go make a lot of radio noise, so when the strike team comes along the radar is busy looking in the wrong spot. This is how Ukraine sank the Moskva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva , a decoy made noise over at 6 o clock while cruise missiles came in from 9 o clock. Absolutely textbook maneuver!
We bomb the radar when we can, which makes it not work
I’m gonna need to see some peer reviewed source for that, m8
I mean, that’s what chaff is.
Ah, well. Guess they figured that out a while ago huh.
Drone swarm with flat fronts all around the jet, randomly repositioning so that actual target is never in the same place on the signature?
Maybe if the jet was moving at walking speed
How about instead of one really big dot, you just send lots and lots of tiny dots! How many are there? I don’t know!
The 1980s answer was they also have humans on the ground reporting the plane in the sky. Once they know where you are generally, they can narrow with heat and laser acquisition.
In 2025, I don’t know where the tech is.
The large dot could conceivably be unscrambled with code to provide the accurate location of the object.
